The History of Vatican II

Lecture 6: The Effects of Council Part II

James Hitchcock

In the previous lecture we talked about the
aftermath of the Council, some of the reactions to it, and that's the
subject that I want to continue with today and perhaps give a little
bit of prognosis about the future. At the end of the last lecture I was
making the distinction between two approaches to the Council, there are
two approaches to the subject of renewal. The one which is called
resourcement, going back to the sources, going back to the early
Church. The other is modernism, that is, looking to contemporary
culture for a way of renewing the Church. Those who advocate the
second, the modernist agenda, can point to some limited places in the
Council documents which seem to support their position. In the decree
on religious life, for example, the Council says that nuns should
not be wearing habits which are cumbersome and completely out of date
but should have a somewhat more streamlined and more modern, more
convenient sort of habit. You could look at little things like saying
old fashioned veils existed at a time when nuns didn't drive cars, but
sometimes now they do, and they have to be able to look in the rear
view mirror.

In the decree on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et
Spes, the Council does say that we can learn from the world. We
have to learn to speak to the world in language the world can
understand, and human wisdom does develop certain insights which can be
useful to us within the Church. But as we talked about when we
discussed Gaudium et Spes, you cannot read that document without
realizing that there is much more emphasis on what the world can learn
from the Church than there is on what the Church can learn from the
world. Pretty clearly in that dialogue the Second Vatican Council
envisions the Church primarily as the teacher. One might use an analogy
of a seminar in a university which is run on a discussion basis in
which the students participate and the professor listens, and maybe
sometimes the student says something that the professor hadn't thought
of before. And the professor says that's a very brilliant idea. But if
the professor is earning his salary, he surely knows a lot more than
the students do. Any professor who is conducting a seminar in which he
is mostly learning and not teaching is taking money under false
pretenses. We can make that analogy: the Church can listen, it can
dialog with the modern world, but always with the understanding that
the Church has a wisdom which the modern world lacks and which the
modern world badly needs.

No one can understand the Council and the effect it had, it seems to
me, who was not alive at the time, for the simple reason that the
psychology of it, the mood of the time, was so important, similar to
what I said in the first lecture about the tone and the mood of the
Pontificate of John XXIII, beyond what it is he may have actually said
or done. Things were moving with such speed, unexpected things were
happening. The Church which had seemed to be immobile for centuries,
which had seemed to be a monolith that was unmoving for centuries, now
suddenly seemed to be in rapid motion. It was exhilarating. It was not
a time for calm and reasoned judgment because people were really being
carried along by the excitement of the moment. In some cases it might
be negative; in most cases it was very positive. So in one sense most
of the periti, the experts, who came to the Council in 1962 were
probably self-consciously orthodox and wanted to operate within the
framework of orthodox Catholic teaching, but their thinking changed
rapidly as they talked with one another, as they talked with bishops,
as they heard things on the floor of the Council, as questions were
raised which they hadn't thought of before.

In the previous lecture I talked about how this worked itself out
with regard to the subject of birth control, in which the Papal birth
control commission in the beginning wanted very much to operate within
the framework of orthodox teaching. By the end five years later it was
calling for orthodox teaching to be scrapped. I don't think there was a
conspiracy there from the beginning. I think it was a question of
people changing their minds. Some of that happened during the Council
itself. So by the end of the Council in 1965 there were periti
and bishops and others who were a good deal more radical than they had
been at the beginning. I think there were people by the end of the
Council in 1965 who had a vision of what the Council should be doing
that they realized was too radical, was not going to be adopted. What
these people in effect said, and they turned out to be right, was that
it doesn't matter so much what the Council actually said as what people
think it said. Even though we have not captured the machinery of the
Council, even though we have not gotten the Council to say everything
we want it to say, we will be the ones who will interpret the Council
to the Catholic world. Consequently we will gain these victories
afterwards that we failed to gain on the floor of the Council itself.
We could again use birth control as a handy example.

The issues here are so broad and they cut so deep that it is very
hard, even to summarize them. But the fundamental issue is the
distinction between the renewal of the Church as resourcemment,
going back to its origins, going back to its authentic roots, its
authentic traditions, and the renewal of the Church as bringing it into
conformity with modern culture. That was where the profound division
took place. In the many thousands of words in the Conciliar documents
you can, of course, find the Council Fathers saying a great variety of
things. And if you look hard enough, and if you come across, here and
there, a phrase or a sentence that seems to support your position, and
if you prescind from the surrounding context, and if you prescind from
the overall thrust of the Council then you can lift that phrase, or
that sentence, and hold it up and say, This is what the Council was
all about. So from the decree Gaudium et Spes you can take
these few sentences which talk about the fact that the Church has got
something to learn from the world. and you can say, See, we are called
now to a new humility. We are supposed to stop insisting that we have
the truth. We are supposed to stop insisting that the Catholic Church
is the true Church. We are supposed to go in a humble manner to our
contemporaries, who may be non-believers even, and we are supposed to
try to learn from them. That is what the Council mandated that we
should do.

The word mandate deserves a little attention too for a moment
because it is one of the ironies of the post conciliar period. Not long
after the Council, a priest who was a liberal liturgist addressed the
subject of those Catholics who seemed to be dragging their feet on
liturgical changes. They were attached to the old Latin Mass. They
bemoaned the fact that the old novena devotions were being abolished.
And this priest said, You can handle this problem in various ways,
but here is the bottom line: obedience, obedience. Are these people
good Catholics? Then tell them to obey the hierarchy.

For a period of several years after the Council obedience was in
fact a major theme. People talked about the decrees of the Council,
which are like decrees issued by a King. And indeed they were decrees.
They talked about the spirit of submission which was owed to the
hierarchy of the Church. They emphasized that everything that came
forth from the Council was official. It was not somebody's opinion, it
was official. It had been approved by the Pope himself. So if you
didn't go along with these changes you were a bad Catholic. Those who
resisted too strongly like the LeFevreists, whom we talked about in the
previous lecture, in fact ended up getting excommunicated.

But by the time of the birth control encyclical, Humanae
Vitae, in 1968 obedience goes by the boards. Obviously those who
rejected Humanae Vitae could not claim they were being obedient.
So they now condemned the notion of obedience as being one of mindless
submission and instead they emphasized conscience, freedom, autonomy,
the right of everyone to make up his own mind. One of the ways in which
I think there was considerable falsehood here was that liberals within
the Church used the notion of obedience to beat people into submission
when that served their purpose. Then when it had ceased to serve their
purpose they did a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and they talked
about revolt, dissent, conscience, freedom, independence, autonomy.

But they had been rather successful in suppressing whatever doubts,
misgivings, more conservative Catholics had had after the Council. The
same thing was carried on in a smaller scale in various religious
orders, where often the rank-and-file members of the order were rather
uneasy by the direction in which the superiors seemed to be taking
them. They were told, You have all taken vows of obedience and you
are supposed to do what your superiors tell you, and it doesn't matter
whether you like it or not. Ironically they were being commanded by
their superiors supposedly to be more democratic. This is paradoxical.
We are now supposed to be running this community on a democratic basis.
Everyone's opinion is as good as everyone else's. If you don't like it,
obey it, because that's what your superiors are commanding you to do.
More than a little contradictory.

One of the factors at the Second Vatican Council which was not well
enough appreciated by Church authorities was the importance of the
media and the way in which the Council was a media event. Of course the
media had been around for a long time. The mass press had originated in
the nineteenth century. The electronic media, especially television,
were still pretty new in 1962. Commercial television had only been
around for about fifteen years. But the Church always
possessed a somewhat uneasy relationship with the media. I think that
the hierarchy had always wanted to conduct business as much as possible
in an atmosphere of confidentiality, even of secrecy. One might say
this is characteristic of a hierarchical institution in which you don't
feel as though you have to keep telling people what is going on
because it's none of their business. The tendency of the Church in
dealing with the media had been to issue formal statements and
not want to answer a lot of questions.

John XXIII had, no question about it, been a kind of media
superstar. I don't think he started out to be one but he happened to be
one. He probably discovered to his surprise at some point that that's
what he was. The media couldn't get enough of him. He was such a
refreshing figure, he was such an unusual character to be Pope, they
thought. He did so many dramatic and even unexpected things which were
very media appropriate: visiting a jail, meeting with Nikita
Krushchev's son-in-law, meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury,
walking in procession rather than being carried on his ceremonial
chair. There were endless media opportunities with regard to this Pope.
But it had not been planned that way. The Holy See did not think: In
the future let's try to have more of this. Paul VI, his successor,
was an austere man and not somebody who excited the popular
imagination. He didn't provide very many media opportunities, even
though he was widely traveled, and of course the press followed
that.

The Council itself, above all, would be a great media event. Why? I
don't know if the journalists themselves in the beginning knew why and
that, in fact, was probably part of the reason why it was a media event
-- because everybody was puzzled, everybody was mystified. What is
this? What is an Ecumenical Council? Why has he called an Ecumenical
Council? What is it going to do? And the reporters were intrigued if
for no other reason than this, trying to find out what it was all
about. So it was covered in the media to the saturation point. Major
publications, journals, newspapers, magazines, at what was obviously
considerable expense, assigned full-time reporters to stay in
Rome for three whole years pursuing this "story." It was to them
obviously that important.

There were journalists in this process who were more than
journalists and who consciously saw themselves as not just reporting
what was going on but also attempting to affect what was going on. In
the United States probably the single most important set of articles,
later books, in terms of forming people's impression of the Council,
was a series that appeared in The New Yorker magazine called,
Letter from Vatican City. For years The New Yorker had
regularly run Letter from London, Letter from Paris, etc. So now
they ran Letter from Vatican City, under the name of a man
called Xavier Rynne. Xavier Rynne later was confirmed to be an American
priest in Rome named Francis X. Murphy. These Letters from Vatican
City purported to be an insider's account of what was happening at
the Council -- very detailed, eventually three volumes, three books. In
a way they were an insider's account. Father Murphy knew a lot about
what was going on. He had good sources, he had access, he knew bishops,
he knew cardinals, he knew Vatican officials, he knew lots of people.
But it was also an attempt to shape the public impression of the
Council in a particular way, and in that sense I don't think that it
was balanced and perhaps not even in some ways a fully honest
account.

It was he, above all, who established in the public's mind the idea
that this was a titanic battle between "liberals" and "conservatives".
The liberals were those who wanted more fresh air in the Church, who
wanted the Church to change. They were the Modernists, though he didn't
use the term. They wanted the Church to update itself; they saw the
secular culture as being the yardstick by which we should measure
ourselves. The conservatives were the stuffy old reactionaries who were
holding back progress. Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, whom we mentioned in
the first lecture, the man officially in charge of preserving orthodoxy
in the Church, kept warning, warning, warning that there were dangers
inherent in some of these things. He was cast by Xavier Rynne as the
great villain, almost an evil man, because he stood in the way of
progress. On the other hand, anybody who got up at the Council and
advocated any sort of change, no matter what, was a hero.

That was a very simplistic way of viewing the Council. The subtle
theological issues that were discussed there, and which we've discussed
in the course of these lectures, could not be adequately fit into this
simplistic conflict of liberals and conservatives. And I believe that
Father Murphy knew that. But it was a brilliant and brilliantly
successful propaganda effort to imprint on the minds primarily of
American Catholics an interpretation of what was really going on in
Rome. People who couldn't otherwise make sense of the Council, didn't
really understand the issues, found it all much too esoteric for them,
could understand it in the simplistic terms of Xavier Rynne a.k.a.
Francis X. Murphy.

Time magazine, which was a much more influential journal
then, than it is now, was represented at the Council by a reporter
whose name was Robert Blair Kaiser. He had been at one time a Jesuit.
He was not a priest but he had been a Jesuit, had studied for the
priesthood, and was therefore somebody who knew something. He wasn't an
ignorant man who had to learn it all from scratch; he was fairly
sophisticated in religious matters. But Robert Blair Kaiser's reporting
was very much along the same lines as that of Xavier Rynne, the
good-guy liberals versus the bad-guy conservatives. Every day there
was a shootout at the O.K. Corral over some issue or other. Fortunately
most of the time the good-guy liberals managed to disarm the bad-guy
conservatives. They shot the guns out of their hands. But unfortunately
the bad-guy conservatives kept getting more guns, and so there would be
another shootout maybe a week or two later.

As it turned out in some of the autobiographical things which he
later wrote, Kaiser had a very clear agenda from the very beginning.
One major part of that agenda was birth control. He had been poking
around in that area and making contact with certain theologians who
were privately or secretly supportive of birth control before the
Council. He had made contact with certain influential Belgian and Dutch
theologians. When he went to the Council he understood that there was a
liberal agenda, the modernist agenda as we've called it, and he was
going to use his magazine, Time magazine, to push it. And he did
so, and very effectively. Unfortunately the average American Catholic,
and this includes most priests and most nuns, learned what the Council
was all about more from Time magazine and The New Yorker
than from any other source.

There is a massive failure of education here on the part of the
Church. One would assume that given an event like the Council that the
hierarchy would have put into gear a massive educational project. They
would have been lining up books, they would have been training
teachers, they would have been announcing schools, workshops in every
parish, whatever. And they would have insured the fact that what was
presented to people as the authentic teaching of the Council really was
the authentic teaching of the Council. To an amazing degree this task
was neglected. There was, in fact, as far as I can see, practically no
systematic effort to educate Catholics as to the meaning of the
Council. They were left to discern its meaning in just about any way
they could. And if they were reading the New Yorker they got it
from Xavier Rynne, and if they were reading Time magazine they
got it from Robert Blair Kaiser. Some variation on the views of those
two men appeared in most of the secular press. So not only did there
persist a good deal of confusion as to what the Council was all about,
but there was even a completely skewed, even false notion of what it
was all about. Victories that could not be won on the floor of the
Council itself, victories that could not be ratified in the Conciliar
decrees, were won after the Council in terms of what people thought the
Council said as opposed to what it actually said. The obligation of
obedience was used over and over again to get reluctant people to go
along with the Council's changes, until such time as obedience had
outlasted its usefulness and then the shift was to independence and
freedom.

Parallel to that, closely related to it, is the question of whether
the Council itself has authority. Catholics and Protestants, when the
split between them occurred in the sixteenth century, spent enormous
amounts of time disputing passages of Scripture. They both acknowledged
that the Scripture is Divine Revelation, the Scripture is where Divine
truth is found, and as Christians we must follow the Holy Scripture. So
the question is, what is the authentic meaning of the Scripture?
Protestants and Catholics disagreed. In the beginning the division
between liberals and conservatives, so called in the Church, was along
those same lines except using the Council. So there were careful
word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence analyses of Lumen Gentium
concerning the Church, Gaudium et Spes concerning the Church and
the world, and so on. But look, it says this here. Oh yes but look, it
says that here. And if you take this sentence you have to put it in the
context of the entire document -- therefore it won't bear your
interpretation.

There was legitimate disagreement as to what the Council had taught,
what the Council had intended. But before very long the more
conservative Catholics discovered that if they cited a Council text,
for example the decree on the Liturgy where it says, no one, not
even a priest, may add to or subtract from or otherwise alter the
sacred text of the liturgy, the response is likely to be, We are
acting in accordance with the spirit of Vatican II. Saint Paul said
the letter kills and the Spirit gives life. He meant by that a kind of
a leaden-footed literalism blindly following something written down on
a piece of paper and not really understand the spirit or the heart of
what is behind it. He meant that you can read the Bible, for example,
but if you don't have faith you get nothing out of it. He did not
intend to set up the conflict between the letter and the spirit as
though the true understanding of Scripture contradicts the literal
statements of the Bible. But in a way that's what many of the liberals
started saying after Vatican II when they invoked the spirit of Vatican
II. The spirit of Vatican II somehow existed outside of the text
itself. The spirit of Vatican II somehow existed independently of the
Council Fathers who had been Vatican II. You didn't need to cite any
specific authority within the Council documents in order to justify
your position. You simply had to say: This is the spirit of Vatican
II.

In other words Vatican II itself ceased to have authoritative power.
Indeed, today liberal and conservative Catholics do not debate with
one another by close analyses of Conciliar text. It is only the
so-called conservative Catholics today who pay close attention to
Conciliar text, and who are sometimes puzzled by what may seem to them
inconsistent passages which they are then sincerely desirous of
reconciling, working out. They are genuinely puzzled; they genuinely
want to know what the Council taught. They genuinely want to submit
themselves to the Council's teachings. Increasingly liberals have been
content to make vague references to the Council, or to the occasional
phrase or sentence here or there.

I myself not long ago became involved in an exchange with a
professional theologian over the nature of the Church. To my amazement
I discovered that in discussing the nature of the Church according to
Vatican II he did not even mention Lumen Gentium, the decree on
the Church of the Second Vatican Council. Too many things in there
would be embarrassing to his position, and so he, in his mind quite
properly, discards it. The liberal attitude towards Vatican II is to
think of Vatican II as merely the beginning of a process. Liberals say
that if we go back now we see that even those so called liberals of
Vatican II were hopelessly conservative, hopelessly reactionary,
hopelessly naive, hopelessly out of touch. They didn't even begin to
see the extent of the problems. If you push them hard
enough they will admit that a lot of what is found in the decrees of
Vatican II sounds very very conservative.

Every once in a while in the United States somebody tries the
experiment of going around and asking people on the street. They read
something, "all men are created equal", or something of that kind. And
they say, "What do you think of that?" Inevitably they tend to get an
answer such as, "Sounds like Communism to me". Whereas of course it
comes from the Declaration of Independence. You could go along today
among Catholics and read them a whole long list of statements and say
how do you characterize these in terms of the Church? And many people
would say, "those are pre-Conciliar", when in fact they are statements
actually taken from the Second Vatican Council itself.

What these people are doing is quite logical given their own
assumptions, these are the modernists for whom contemporary culture,
contemporary society is the ultimate measurement of truth. They would
say, You are extremely naive to think that somehow the Second
Vatican Council of the early 1960s embodied an enduring eternal truth.
The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council had flashes of insights, but
they were still timid, they were still too much anchored in the past,
they pulled their punches. They didn't have the courage to go far
enough with their insights. So we now would have to view Vatican II
pretty much as a historical curiosity. We venerate it as a historical
event of importance. We venerate it as the event which started us on
this road which we now travel, but we are in no sense bound by it. And
if you prove to me that something that I'm saying is contrary to the
teaching of Vatican II, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference to
me. I don't have that same attitude towards Vatican II of reverence and
obedience that you seem to have. So in that sense there has been a
rejection of Vatican II on the left. We have the LeFevreist rejecting
it on the right. But there has been a rejection of it also on the
left.

Related to the fact that Vatican II was a great media event is the
timing of when it occurred. About 1959-1960 when the Council was first
announced the world by and large, and the Church by and large, appeared
to be in a very stable, settled condition, as we talked about in the
first lecture. Certainly in retrospect, if we compare it to what came
later, it appeared to be in a stable and settled condition. On most
moral questions, for example, there appeared to be a broad consensus.
Birth control was just about the only moral issue of any note where
Catholics disagreed with non-Catholics. Planned Parenthood as late as
1964 still said that abortion was the taking of a human life and
opposed it. Catholics were known to be stricter on the subject of
divorce than most other people, but everybody admitted that divorce was
really a very bad thing and
it was happening too often. These moral positions were not seen as
being Catholic doctrine, or even Christian doctrine. They were seen as
the moral insights of human beings founded on reason, what Catholics
call the moral law. So it looked to be a rather stable and settled
society.

When the Council ended in 1965 we were just on the lip of the
phenomenon which would come to be called the sixties. The term the
sixties is inaccurate: the major events that we call the sixties,
and what we conjure up when we use that term, took place between about
1966 and 1973. But that's a quibble, and we can use the term the
sixties as a matter of convenience.

In one of my earlier lectures I alluded to the presidency of John F.
Kennedy, and to the enormous optimism that characterized him, just as
John XXIII had an enormous optimism. I said that Kennedy was convinced
that if we put our minds to it and work hard enough we get the best and
the brightest young men. Then we really can solve all our social
problems. The reason we haven't solved our problems is because we
really didn't want to. We didn't try hard enough. He was going to do
it. He inspired in many people an enormous sense of idealism and
optimism. Yes, yes, yes, we are going to do it. His
assassination in 1963, during the Council, was perhaps a warning that
the world is not as nice a place as Kennedy tried to make out. Here
was a dark deed materializing out of nowhere. Nobody could predict it,
nobody could anticipate it, nobody could even really explain it, and
suddenly the idealistic young president was snuffed out. One might
respond to that by saying that there is an evil in the universe which
does not lend itself to the optimistic programs of an idealistic
president. Before very long the bright optimism of the Kennedy
presidency had given way to bitterness, cynicism, anger, outright
rebellion, violence -- the phenomenon which we broadly called the New
Left.

Primarily it seemed to have two focal points. The war in Viet Nam
was one. Kennedy historians will debate for a long time who was
primarily responsible for getting the United States into Viet Nam. Some
say Kennedy, some say Lyndon Johnson. A fairly large number of
advisors, so called, were already there during the Kennedy
administration, and it seems likely that had he lived he would have
kept committing more and more. In any case it was Lyndon Johnson who
began sending the troops on a large scale. The war became immensely
unpopular, especially on the college campuses. We had riots,
demonstrations, sit-ins, acts of violence, and so forth, in protest of
the war. The war was called evil, the war was called proof that the
United States is an evil society, though the war began in the same
spirit of optimism and idealism that Kennedy showed in all other
respects -- an idealistic America was going to liberate Southeast Asia
from the tyranny of Communism and show them how much better freedom
is.

In the summer of 1968 at the very moment when there were
demonstrations on the campus of the Catholic University of America
against the Papal birth control encyclical, Humanae Vitae, there
were demonstrations all over the United States against the Viet Nam
war. And at almost that moment, a little before, President Lyndon
Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection, apparently
believing among other things that he could not be reelected. A bitter
fight went on within the Democratic party as to who would be nominated.
Shortly after the issuance of Humanae Vitae the Democratic
Convention met in Chicago and the students, so called, pitted
themselves against the police. They were beaten and arrested and
scattered and it left the Democratic party in shambles, and the
idealism of John F. Kennedy a bitter taste in the mouths of many
people.

It is not just that there was a coincidence in timing between the
reaction to Humanae Vitae and the reaction to the Viet Nam war.
There is a sort of common thread, a common psychological thread, that
runs through them. The New Left ended abruptly, and it has often been
pointed out that it ended as soon as the draft ended, which to some
extent calls into question the idealism of some of the New Left people.
They said they were opposing the war on the grounds that it was
immoral, but on the other hand once they became assured that they
themselves would not be drafted their opposition ceased. Nonetheless,
the New Left more or less came to an end. There had been another prong
to it, the Civil Rights Movement, and that had been equally volatile --
it also led to riots. But that had become increasingly a Black movement
in which white leftists like students were no longer welcome.

The opposition of the New Left to the Viet Nam war was
like a magician who holds up his left hand and he has got something in
his left hand that he wants you to look at. While you are looking at it
he is doing something down here with his right hand that you don't
notice, which is going to allow him to do his magic trick. While the
focus of the country was on the Viet Nam war, less well noticed
although it was visible, the real purpose of what we call the sixties
or the New Left was actually cultural change -- changes in the way
people lived, not so much in political issues. Originally at the
University of California Berkeley they had the so-called free speech
movement in which they were asking for political freedom to criticize
government policy. But that quickly changed into what they called the
filthy speech movement, we demand the right to scream obscenities in
public. It was a precursor immediately of what would come to be
called the sexual revolution. And the sexual revolution was perhaps
worked out first of all on the college campuses among new leftists.
That is to say we don't acknowledge traditional sexual morality
which is not just Catholic, not even just Christian, but broadly
accepted in American society. Sex is for fun, sex is for recreation,
sex is for enjoyment -- absolute contradiction of what the Pope
will be saying in Humanae Vitae. We should have the right to
have sex any time, anywhere, with anybody, as much as we choose and no
one should be able to tell us otherwise.

Abuse of drugs accompanies this. In effect in many places they claim
successfully the right to use drugs. It may not be officially
recognized since it is a crime, but everybody knows it's going on. And
it becomes respectable in widely expanding American circles to make use
of drugs, just as the sexual revolution emanates outward from the
college campuses into the ranks of the middle class. The new left, as a
distinct movement, ended. But as some commentators have pointed out,
the reason why it ended as a distinct movement is because it entered
the mainstream of American culture. This is the environment in which
the attempt is made to apply the Second Vatican Council. It would have
taken enormous effort, enormous resolve, enormous planning, enormous
discipline under those conditions to have conveyed to Catholics what
the meaning of the Council genuinely was.

But, as we have said, there was a general lack of educational
program, of forethought, and there was, in my opinion, an amazing lack
of concern about how the authentic Council could be presented to
people. There was very little effort made to warn people against false
interpretations. There was very little effort made to teach them how to
make distinctions between authentic and inauthentic forms of renewal.
We went through a period after the Council when anything that called
itself renewal could pretty well gain acceptance. The cautious
statement in Gaudium et Spes that the Church does have certain
things which it can learn from the world -- that very cautious
statement is taken to mean that we now have to learn from the world
wholesale. Well what is the world?

When Gaudium et Spes was written, once again this was a
pretty stable world in which the Church could say, The world in a
way agrees with us on a lot of things even though they don't have the
same starting point we do. But within three years of the Council,
1968, what is the world? Well, the world is the thing we call the
sixties. If you want to learn from the world then you presumably will
conclude that the practitioners of the sexual revolution are closer to
the truth than those who are preaching chastity. Above all the dominant
theme of the cultural phenomenon which we call the sixties was
liberation, freedom understood in a certain sense. The cultural
movement of the sixties believed that almost everything from the past
was a burden, an obstacle. It was false, it was distortion, it was
oppression. If you weren't sure you were always better off to reject
the past, discard the past. The slogan: never trust anyone over 30
because older people just have their heads on wrong. Innovation is
good; everything that calls itself new is automatically better than
everything that calls itself old -- what one commentator called the
systematic hunting down of all settled convictions, the systematic
hunting down of all settled convictions. Whatever it is you may have
thought was true, whether it has to do with sex or drugs or religion or
family life or politics or education -- whatever you thought was true
is very likely false. And the farther you get away from that, the
closer to the truth you will become.

In the terms of the theological distortion of the concept of the
pilgrim Church, the secular idea carried over into religion that there
are no settled truths, there are no fixed certainties, and so the
process of searching, wandering, making mistakes and so forth, is
itself what is valuable, not the goal, because in fact you may never
reach any goal. It would be impossible under the best of circumstances
that some of this would not affect the Church. Or we might say infect
the Church. John XXIII had talked about opening windows and it is a two
way process. If you open windows something comes in from the outside,
something from the inside goes out. I'm convinced that the purpose of
Vatican II in the minds of John XXIII and others was to open windows or
doors so that the Church could go into the world and evangelize the
world, win the world for Christ. It is not insignificant that when the
doors of the Vatican opened not only did the Pope invite in visitors,
like the Archbishop of Canterbury, but increasingly the Pope's went out
culminating in the unprecedented world travel of Pope John Paul II. But
with the doors and windows open it was inevitable that some things
would come in.

So the Church soon found itself affected in various ways: by
Marxism, by principles of modern psychology, by any number of other
things that previously had been held at arm's length. Psychology would
be a very good example. The Council gave cautious endorsement to the
use of psychology under certain circumstances. For example, one of the
ways it could be used legitimately would be to examine young people who
wanted to become priests or religious to determine if they have any
serious psychological problems. But pretty soon psychology for a lot of
people became almost a God and they interpreted psychology falsely as
meaning that you should do what you want to do, that to repress
yourself was a form of neurosis, a form of psychological damage. The
very idea of obedience in the religious sense became a problem. The
very idea of chastity became a problem. The working slogan came to be
do your own thing, do what makes you feel good, follow your gut
feelings.

Under the best of circumstances it would have been impossible to
keep this sort of influence out of the Church. I think it will look to
future historians quite remarkable that there was no more serious and
systematic effort to keep that from happening. That the Second Vatican
Council was allowed to be hijacked by people who had an agenda which
they themselves often knew was very much at odds with the correct
meaning of the Council: the people who said it was a nice starting
point but we don't feel bound by it anymore ourselves. There is much
speculation among more conservative Catholics as to what exactly went
wrong. How did the high promise, the high optimism of Pope John XXIII
seem to get subverted? And I think that the one most fundamental
explanation above all others is that as soon as the Council was over it
became entangled in the great cultural revolution that was called the
sixties. It got assimilated into cultural revolution so that a lot of
people saw the renewal of the Church as merely being an aspect of the
larger cultural revolution of the sixties.

It will take decades to assess accurately, justly, correctly,
objectively, the outcome of the Council. It has often been pointed out
that historically Councils do not fully realize what they intend to do
for some decades afterwards. That was certainly true of Trent, and the
same thing may well be true of Vatican II. We do, in fact, see numerous
signs of authentic renewal around us. We see new religious orders
coming into existence. A great crisis of vocations for decades followed
Vatican II. We now know that it isn't really a crisis of vocations,
that if you present to young people a heroic ideal of religious life
and priestly life, one of service and self-sacrifice, of devotion to
Christ, devotion to the Church, that they will answer that call
generously, as they did in the past. We have seen the establishment of
new Catholic schools on all levels from grammar school up through
college to compensate for the loss of religious identity on the part of
some of the older Catholic institutions. We have seen lay movements
emerge which are very apostolic in nature. We have seen the
multiplication of Catholic publications of all kinds, many of them very
orthodox in nature. We have seen the emergence of good strong bishops
who are giving us very good leadership. We have had of course our own
Saints like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and we have had the immense
leadership of John Paul II, I think the greatest intellect, the
greatest theologian, the greatest teacher ever to occupy the Papal
throne. He will be studied as one of the great Catholic thinkers of the
twentieth century even apart from the fact that he was Pope.

When I'm asked What do you think is happening in the Church?
I always invoke what I call the two elevator theory. One is going up
and one is going down side by side. I think more and more people are
getting on the up elevator it as it goes up. I think the down elevator
does continue to go down so both things are happening here
simultaneously.

The Council, it has often been, said was the Council of the laity
saw the emergence of the laity. True enough. Not much attention was
paid to the laity in previous Councils. This was often a liberal idea,
emancipating the laity from the control of the hierarchy. But I think
one of the more interesting things that has happened since the Council
is the way in which lay people have taken the lead often enough in
trying to get an authentic interpretation of the Council and have been
the ones who have organized and gotten started authentic renewal
movements within the Church. And this I think can be seen as an
enormous flowering of the true spirit of the Second Vatican
Council.